Rails 3.1 .css.less caching error - ruby-on-rails

I am quite new with Rails and I am having some irritating problems with caching of css files.
I have a .css.less file with imports inside it. It's the only stylesheet the app includes, so the other files get imported only once and by this unique stylesheet.
One of those imported .css.less stylesheets seems to be cached somewhere, because does not change in the browser when I change it's source.
I can only see the changes I made if I change something in the root stylesheet.
I have the server in development mode, so the caching should be off. I have also used <%= stylesheet_include_tag "style", :cache => false %>
I tried with Chrome and Firefox, with and without clearing their cache too. Always the same result, if I work only on that file the css the page receives when reloaded doesn't have the changes...
I also stopped the server and rm everything in the tmp folder of the app. No changes.
I am using Rails 3.1 with Ruby 1.9.3, with the less-bootstrap-rails gem. Both the root stylesheet and the imported one have .css.less extension.
What am I missing?
Thank you!

This is an area where I think the asset pipeline is broken, but I don't think there's a good fix.
If I remember correctly, to get changes in files you've included/required in your .css.less file, you need to change the .css.less file itself.

I had this on Rails 4.0.8, infuriating. The config changes mentioned above didn't help. Here's what seems to have fixed it for me:
Ensure NO FILES share a base name. For example, you have a reports.css.less and a reports.js.coffee? Doesn't matter if they're in the same directory or not. Rename or delete one of them. (I changed it to reports-styles.css.less).
Blow away your cache: rm -rf tmp/cache
Restart your Rails app.
This appears to be a decent fix but, since I don't know what's actually going on, this could be totally false and it's just working by coincidence now. Sorry this answer isn't more rigorous!

I've just came across the exact same problem.
I found that if you rename your *.css.less file (the one with the imports inside) to *.less, then this weird cacheing problem gets resolved.

Add this to your config/application.rb
# Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all your assets
config.assets.version = '1.0'
See more at: Ruby on Rails Guide: Asset Pipeline

Related

Rails does not update the fingerprint for some assets

I notice there is a weird thing going on in rails 4.2.0. I am using the default dev environment. When I change some of my JS files, the fingerprint does not change and it keeps serving the old file. The weird thing is that this does not happen to all my JS/CSS files. I tried rebooting my machine and restarting rails server. None of them worked. Renaming the file works, but when I rename it back to the old one, it starts serving the old version again. Anyone has an idea why?
Make sure to set config.serve_static_files = false in your config/environments/development.rb and to reset your browser cache.
I am not sure if we have the same situation, but hopefully this helps.
Reference
I was using a custom application-all.scss instead of the normal application.scss stylesheet in which application-all.scss used to be part of Rails.application.config.assets.precompile.
I renamed application-all.scss into the digested-name application.scss, and updated related code.
After that, it worked now for me.

How to tell Rails to not clean some assets in the public folder

The issue here is that I have Bootstrap on production looking for the fonts at:
assets/spree/fonts/glyphicons-the-file-name.something
When in development mode, it looks for these assets in:
fonts/glyphicons-the-file-name.something
So what I did was I added the fonts folder into public and it all worked. I did the same for production. You can guess that I'm now dealing with a rails assets:clean issue that must be running and removing the files, hence not allowing them to appear.
Is there a way to tell Rails to not clean the files in assets/spree/fonts?
I'm assuming you installed the bootstrap files manually?
If you instead use a gem such as the following, then you won't have to worry about these issues:
gem "bootstrap-sass"
Alternatively, you should be installing everything into your vendor directory. As you've found you'll then have issues with any linked assets within these files. The correct fix for this would be to edit the bootstrap source to use the correct asset_path helpers.
Obviously that's quite a bit of maintenance overhead when you get round to doing the next bootstrap update.
I'd take a look at the bootstrap-sass gem, even if you decide not to use it.

Less compiler doesn't update css file after LESS code is updated

This is way beyond my knowledge..
I was migrating my rails 3 application from Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 3. I downloaded Bootstrap 3 and FontAwesome, put them into my assets folder. Then I tried to modify the font path. I change #FontAwesomePath in font-awesome/variables.less several times, however it still don't points to the correct path. (I put font files in ./app/assets/fonts/font-awesome/)
#FontAwesomePath: "fonts/font-awesome"
It's ok, cuz I saw the line below this one is a cdn path to font files:
//#FontAwesomePath: "//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/3.2.1/font"; // for referencing Bootstrap CDN font files directly
I uncomment this line, everything seems fine. The compiled css file load the font from cdn and all icons are displaying.
Then I delete this line, try to point #FontAwesomePath back to local server again. STRANGE thing happened! No matter what I did, the compiled css file points it to the CDN path! I tried to clear browser cache, reboot rails server (I was using development mode of rails server), even to load the website from other computers, nothing changes. It insisting point #FontAwesomePath to the CDN path even no where in the whole application code exists the url! I can only image there is some kind of variable cache in less compiler. Can anybody tell me what's happened inside this? It's driven me crazy.
edit: I'm using less gem (v 2.3.2), which includes lesscss v 1.3.3.
I had issues with CSS updates, these where only solved by going to tmp > cache and deleting the assets folder then restarting the server. The CSS was then updated.
Hope this helps.
Steph

Rails with Twitter Bootstrap: still serving an old asset

Going nuts here. I'm developing a rails app, and I'm using the twitter-bootstrap-rails gem in order to include the Twitter Bootstrap styles in my app. This gem generates a file called 'bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less' in app/assets/stylesheets, which I have been using to modify some of the bootstrap variables and include my own CSS overrides.
Everything has been working fine until today. For some reason, the changes I am making to this file today are getting saved to the file, but Rails is still serving the old version of the file! I've searched and found no precompiled versions of the file anywhere (nothing in public/assets)...only the one in assets/stylesheets which I have been modifying. Everything looks fine as far as the directories within the app go, but then when I start the rails server, load the page, and use the element inspector to look at the stylesheets, it's using an old version of 'bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less' with rules that I have deleted. I've turned of the cache in my browser, and tried it in 4 different browsers too, so I'm pretty sure this isn't a result of browser caching.
The rails asset pipeline just seems to serving a version of the file that doesn't exist! Does anybody have any ideas why this might be happening?
Fixed it.
The asset pipeline was storing a cached version in tmp/cache.
I ran rake tmp:clear, which deleted all the files in there, and then rails served the version of *bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less* that I wanted.
Why the cached version suddenly stopped getting updated is beyond me. Arrghhhh!

Rails 3.1 and Image Assets

I have put all my images for my admin theme in the assets folder within a folder called admin. Then I link to it like normal ie.
# Ruby
image_tag "admin/file.jpg" .....
#CSS
.logo{ background:url('/assets/images/admin/logo.png');
FYI. Just for testing I am not using the asset_path tag just yet as I have not compiled my assets.
Ok all good so far until I decided to update an image. I replaced some colors but on reload the new styled image is not showing. If I view the image directly in the browser its still showing the old image. Going one step further I destroyed the admin images folder. But it has broken nothing all the images are still being displayed. And yes I have cleared my cache and have tried on multiple browsers.
Is there some sort of image caching going on? This is just local development using pow to serve the pages.
Even destroying the whole images folder the images are still being served.
Am I missing something?
In 3.1 you just get rid of the 'images' part of the path. So an image that lives in /assets/images/example.png will actually be accessible in a get request at this url - /assets/example.png
Because the assets/images folder gets generated along with a new 3.1 app, this is the convention that they probably want you to follow. I think that's where image_tag will look for it, but I haven't tested that yet.
Also, during the RailsConf keynote, I remember D2h saying the the public folder should not have much in it anymore, mostly just error pages and a favicon.
You'll want to change the extension of your css file from .css.scss to .css.scss.erb and do:
background-image:url(<%=asset_path "admin/logo.png"%>);
You may need to do a "hard refresh" to see changes. CMD+SHIFT+R on OSX browsers.
In production, make sure
rm -rf public/assets
bundle exec rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=production
happens upon deployment.
For what it's worth, when I did this I found that no folder should be include in the path in the css file. For instance if I have app/assets/images/example.png, and I put this in my css file...
div.example { background: url('example.png'); }
... then somehow it magically works. I figured this out by running the rake assets:precompile task, which just sucks everything out of all your load paths and dumps it in a junk drawer folder: public/assets. That's ironic, IMO...
In any case this means you don't need to put any folder paths, everything in your assets folders will all end up living in one huge directory. How this system resolves file name conflicts is unclear, you may need to be careful about that.
Kind of frustrating there aren't better docs out there for this big of a change.
In rails 4 you can now use a css and sass helper image-url:
div.logo {background-image: image-url("logo.png");}
If your background images aren't showing up consider looking at how you're referencing them in your stylesheets.
when referencing images in CSS or in an IMG tag, use image-name.jpg
while the image is really located under ./assets/images/image-name.jpg
http://railscasts.com/episodes/279-understanding-the-asset-pipeline
This railscast (Rails Tutorial video on asset pipeline) helps a lot to explain the paths in assets pipeline as well. I found it pretty useful, and actually watched it a few times.
The solution I chose is #Lee McAlilly's above, but this railscast helped me to understand why it works. Hope it helps!
The asset pipeline in rails offers a method for this exact thing.
You simply add image_path('image filename') to your css or scss file and rails takes care of everything. For example:
.logo{ background:url(image_path('admin/logo.png'));
(note that it works just like in a .erb view, and you don't use "/assets" or "/assets/images" in the path)
Rails also offers other helper methods, and there's another answer here: How do I use reference images in Sass when using Rails 3.1?

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